[Boron]

Gandalf Parker said:
Boron: thanks for the comments on Pangaea in blitz games. Very appreciated. I particularly like this..

Thats exactly how I feel about it. Too often when people put down Pangaea (not always, but often enough) I see that they are trying to play it like Ulm. Obviously they would suck at that. Im bugged when people rate a nation like Jotunheim, Caelum, Arcoscephale, Tien Chi without trying to use what is obviously a central theme to their design.

Yeah this makes Dominions so great imho .

Dominions is very deep. I think the famous magic the gathering card game is most similiar to dominions.

In both games there are nearly endless options and most units(cards in MTG) are at least in a certain situation/strategy great. So there are almost no useless units at all (and those few units/spells that seem useless can be fixed via creative modding imho).

But because the game is so deep most players will focus on parts of the game only and develop certain specific stragies and specialise on some nations. This is okay of course .

But in this specialization the problem is that potentially there is the rub:
After you have discovered a playstyle you love and "mastered" one or a few nations you might think that you have mastered dominions. But you are too focused on some nations/strats and this can then hamper you more than you think when you try to play other nations that need very different approachs.
If you are used to blue counter/control/combo decks in MTG you might have difficulties making a good green/white rush deck.

Dominions goes even a step further than MTG imho, because MTG is a card game, so it has to be kept simple in some aspects to be playable at all. But Dominions is a PC game, so the PC does the dull work like calculating battles.
And thus Dominions is imho even deeper than MTG.
Many nations have unique national troops that require different approaches, and god design and national mages/spells make every nation unique.

But humans often think in schemes. But Dominions you have to try to play as open minded as possible. Nothing is completely useless, instead everything is useful in some situations and not so useful in other situations.
But these situations can change every turn.

This is imho the most important factor (in a no-diplomacy game) in a Dom MP game. The player who sums up the situation best during the whole game and then reacts accordingly usually wins. This is true for most strategy games, but in no pc-strategy game i know as hard to do as in Dominions, especially because the situation needs to be revaluated every turn and you have to try to be as open minded as possible.

This makes Dominions so unique and great, but everything has it's pros and cons, so occasionally this deepness can also be frustrating or leads to the situation that you say nation XYZ sucks, but it sucks probably only with the approach with which you tried to play this nation.